Timeworn

Timeworn

Walk the same route enough times and the grass gives out under you.

That is the whole idea. Not a seasons mod, not a difficulty slider. One rule,
applied honestly: the world remembers what you did, and what you stopped doing.

No dependencies. No resource pack. Nothing to edit in a text file.

What actually happens

The ground gives way where you walk. Grass wears to dirt path, dirt path
packs down to mud. There is no counter on any block; the odds are simply higher
on ground you cross often, which is what a desire path is. The line between your
door and your mine turns up on its own after a few in-game weeks. Walk it three
abreast and it widens.

Stone you leave alone ages. Cobblestone goes mossy. Brick cracks, then goes
mossy, then gives up and falls back to rubble. Polish wears off. It lands in
patches about three blocks across, so a wall ages unevenly instead of flipping
all at once.

Rooms nobody visits fill up. Cobwebs in the corners where a ceiling meets a
wall. Glow lichen overhead. Vines on stonework outside, leaf litter on the
ground, moss creeping over stone. A room that has been collecting webs for a
long time sometimes collects a spider as well.

Much later, things stop being what they were. Glass clouds over. Timber
dulls one shade at a time down a ladder measured from the plank textures
themselves. The most weathered cobblestone crumbles to gravel, and gravel falls.
Ice nobody breaks packs down into a glacier and stops melting. Mud that never
dries compacts into clay. The cut goes out of sandstone. Mine any of it and you
get what it became, not what it started as.

A road old enough shows its bones. Walk a route until the ground under it
has gone hard, and now and then a stone comes up beside it. Nothing carried it
there; it was under the field the whole time and the track wore the ground off
it.

Thirteen smaller marks. Stone weeps and grows a point in the dark, and what
drips off the ceiling builds back up from the floor. Sand piles against whatever
stops the wind. Water nothing disturbs stops being water anybody would drink. A
stone face does not stay a face; what comes off it gathers at the foot.

Paths nobody uses fade. Stop walking a route and it goes back to dirt, and
vanilla grass does the greening from there.

Living trees are left out of all of it. A trunk and a roof beam are the same
block, so the pack checks for leaves before it touches wood.

The long game

Away from anywhere you have settled, the world starts putting things up.

Ruins. Six kinds, three versions each, turned to any of four bearings.
Houses, towers, halls, wells, cellars, watchposts. Weathered, overgrown, and
carrying whatever the country around them imposes. Some have a book in them.
Some have words cut into a wall.

Dead wood. A snag still standing with its bark sliding off in sheets. A
trunk that came out of the ground on one side and stopped halfway down. A stump
with the length of itself lying beside it. Timber the pack is allowed to age,
since living trees are not.

Old works. Nine standing stones with lintels dropped across them, and long
barrows you can walk into. Both were here before the houses.

Floating islands. Ground that never came down. Soil on top going to rock
below, ore in the keel, vines on the underside, and a pond that spills over the
rim and falls all the way to the ground, which is how you get up there.

Cairns. A few stones stack themselves where somebody died, and weather over.

Somebody was here before you

Three books, fourteen torn writings and fifteen things cut into walls, scattered
across everything above. None of them explains anything. Between them they give
it away: what the nine stones were for, what the small brass thing did, why it
was a mistake, and what you are supposed to do about it.

There is a rite. It is described, in pieces, in several places. Nobody tells you
it exists.

Nights

Days since your last death drive how well armed the dark is. Below five days
nothing changes. Past that, mobs arrive quicker, then better equipped, then
carrying something worth taking off them. Past twenty-five days the nights start
sending something that does not tire.

Every mob is measured against whoever it is standing nearest, not against the
best-geared player on the server. Two people on the same world walk out into
genuinely different nights.

Some nights are their own event: a blood moon, a still night with nothing in it
at all, an eclipse, a storm front, a fall of grey ash that ages the world twice
as fast while it lasts. Whatever walks on those nights has a fair chance of
wearing something, and each kind of night has its own face. They come off about
one time in sixteen.

Thirty-five advancements, in their own tab. Most are handed out when the pack
notices something rather than when you craft something.

All of it is optional

/trigger tw.menu opens a settings menu in chat. Three pages, one click a row,
plain names instead of raw numbers. It runs on a trigger, so players can change
settings on a server without operator permissions and without cheats.

Every system has its own switch. Rates are adjustable. If you want the paths and
nothing else, that is two clicks.

What it costs

Measured on a dedicated 26.2 server with /tick query:

| | Average tick |
| — | — |
| Pack disabled | 0.1 ms |
| Pack enabled, idle | 0.2 ms |
| Sweep at its highest setting, three points, every tick | 1.2 ms |

That last row is twenty times the rate the pack ever actually uses, and it aged
1043 blocks while it was running, so it was doing real work. Against a 50 ms
tick budget the pack’s real cost is a rounding error.

The big builds are saved structures placed by the game in one command, not a few
thousand replayed setblocks. Nothing iterates chunks. Nothing looks outside a
radius around a player. Work is capped by selector limits, so a server with
forty people on it does the same work per second as one with four.

Install

Drop the timeworn folder into <world>/datapacks/, then reopen the world or
run /reload.

Updating

Replace the folder and reload. Settings you changed are kept. Anything the new
version adds arrives turned on, and anything you deliberately switched off stays
off.

Uninstall

Run /function timeworn:uninstall, then delete the folder and reload. It hands
back every scoreboard objective, marker, boss bar, stored value and forced chunk
it ever took. Verified on a live server, not assumed.

Everything the pack does to blocks is cosmetic and reversible by hand. It never
replaces a block you placed.

Compatibility

Minecraft 26.2. Vanilla only, no dependencies, no mixins, no resource pack.
Multiplayer safe: state is per player where it should be, and shared where it
should be.